Recent news from The Johns Hopkins University

This section contains regularly updated highlights of the news from around The Johns Hopkins
University. Links to the complete news reports from the nine schools,
the Applied Physics Laboratory and other centers and institutes are to
the left, as are links to help news media contact the Johns Hopkins
communications offices.

If you think summer in your hometown is hot, consider it fortunate that you don’t live in the Turkana Basin of Kenya, where the average daily temperature has reached the mid-90s or higher, year-round, for the past 4 million years. The need to stay cool in that cradle of human evolution may relate, at least in part, to why pre-humans learned to walk upright, lost the fur that covered the bodies of their predecessors and became able to sweat more, Johns Hopkins University earth scientist Benjamin Passey said.

Using a $736,000 grant administered through the federal stimulus act, Johns Hopkins earth scientist Thomas Haine is working with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop what promises to be the biggest, most cutting-edge and detailed computer model of ocean currents ever made. The supercomputer model, which will be run by a National Science Foundation–built supercomputer capable of doing a million billion calculations per second, will simulate currents in the Arctic, Antarctic and Atlantic oceans in hopes of shedding light on how small-scale turbulent eddies affect large currents, such as the powerful Gulf Stream.